I'll wash my face before bed, scrub my teeth when I remember, grab the book from my bedside table to read, switch on my owl reading lamp, and hunker down into my covers and pillows in my regular nighttime routine.

When I can feel my eyes getting heavy, I'll put the book back on my table.

I'll take my eyeglasses off and tuck them in next to my book and take my arms off.

A quick twist and pull and voilà, my right arm is off.

Now, here's the problem.

You can see the dilemma, right?

If I've already taken one arm off, how am I to take the other one off?

My eldest daughter, Zoe, informed me of this idea flaw when I was bestowing to her my fabulous plan of detachable arms.

She's always been smarter than me.

I guess this idea of detachable arms only works IF you live with others.

Someone who can detach and reattach one of your arms for you.

And please, try not to drink anything before bed, because peeing in the middle of the night will be a no-go unless you want to wake someone to attach at least one of your arms.

Zoe is more interested in detachable legs.

As she, for some unknown reason, has trouble figuring out where to put her legs at night.

But detachable legs are easier to deal with than detachable arms when going about it solo.

But if there's a fire, you better twist and lock quickly!

Of course, this is all just fun and games.

I am in no way making a mockery of people who have lost limbs.

I find that people who are missing limbs to be some of the most courageous people on this planet.

For instance, people who lost their limbs while watching the marathon in Boston.

Doesn't that sound strange?

People lost their limbs, and lives, while watching a running race in Boston.

How did that happen?

Why are things like this happening?

My heart hurts so much when I think about families, friends, children, and strangers being brutally attacked by terrorists while doing mundane things like watching a running race in Boston.

Or watching fireworks in Nice, France.

Families and friends laughing and oohing and aahing while gazing into the night sky as beautiful lights converge into patterns overhead are then viciously run over by a crazy person in a giant truck.

My heart can't take much more of this.

My heart hurts so badly for the families of those innocents who are killed and hurt by these radical terrorists.

And my heart wonders...when will it happen again?

Will I know someone next time?

Will my own family be affected next time?

I fear, it's only a matter of time before I know a name on a list.

Before I recognize a face in a news report.

If only I could detach my heart, put it in a drawer, and not care about the lives lost.

We enjoy the big city and we take our kids to Chicago and St Louis often.

Where we are in big crowds.

The tragedy of September 11, 2001 was really hard for me and my husband.

We lived in Chicago at that time.

Being in such a large city was scary, and we don't live there anymore.

We feel safer and more protected in our little town to the south.

But we travel.

And terrorism has no boundaries.

As we have seen in Boston, NYC, France, and Africa (to name just a few).

I have to force myself to not watch the news.

I have to force myself away from the sights and sounds of the carnage and into the serenity of my farm.

And I want to detach my heart from my body so it doesn't hurt for the mothers whose children are dead.

Because everyone who has died from a ruthless terrorist attack was someone's child.

Spray your kid with a hose when she wanders around the side of the house nude and covered in a not-so mysterious brown substance...I've done that.

Hide your daughter's pillow because it's covered in her own hair that's coming out because she has cancer and you don't want her to be upset by seeing it...unfortunately, I've done that.

All of these things makes you a stronger person.

All of these things have made me a stronger mom.

Sometimes I feel like Supermom.

And the other day I got to use my Supermom powers to save the day.

Well, I saved the frozen yogurt.

Gigi would eat frozen yogurt covered in candy and whipped cream everyday if we let her.

Now, we don't let this happen.

But, we do seem to visit one of our local frozen yogurt shops quite often in the summer.

We've even been known to drive over there and eat frozen yogurt for lunch or dinner.

If you're unfamiliar with a 21st century frozen yogurt shop it's like this...

there are at least a dozen different varieties of frozen yogurt, sorbet, or gelato that you can fill all on your own into a very large cup.

The flavors are varied and can be as simple as watermelon to as complex as sea salt caramel.

Once your cup is filled with one or twelve different flavors (yes, some people get a little bit of every available flavor!) you move on to the toppings bar.

Where you then fill your frozen yogurt/sorbet/gelato mix with toppings ranging from crushed cookies, cereal, and gummi bears to shredded coconut, maraschino cherries, and (at our yogurt shop) this little colored ball called a boba ball that bursts a fruity flavor in your mouth once you bite into it.

Then you take your creation to the cashier where it's weighed and you pay a certain price for each ounce it weighs.

Our favorite shops does a $4 or $5 Fill A Cup Day which is more economical for us because the youngest and smallest person in our group always makes the largest and heaviest cup of yogurt with toppings.

She may be small, but never does anything small.

Last week we were at our fav yogurt place when my Supermom powers quietly showed up.

No one else in my family noticed my Supermom act.

But the guy weighing the yogurt did.

You see, Gigi had filled her cup with four flavors of frozen yogurt and, as it usually is, it was overflowing with gummy worms, boba balls, and whipped cream.

There's a long counter in front of the toppings bar and she was suddenly entranced by the TV screen on the other side of the shop because The Disney Channel was on.

Her arm began sliding her ginormous cup of sweetness down the counter as her eyes were locked into a green platypus named Perry who wears a fedora that was on the TV.

I was at the scale waiting for her weigh-in when I noticed that her cup was not sliding down the counter as it should.

She was sliding it at an angle because she wasn't looking and it began to slide right off of the counter.

It was counterless for a millisecond.

Maybe it was a ittybittysecond.

I jumped into action and hit it with my hand to get the cup (that was about to cost me ten buckaroos) back onto the counter before it became a splatty mess on the floor.

It all took a total of .045 seconds for me to save the day.

Well, to save the day for the yogurt guy who would have had to clean up that mess once it hit the floor.

Gigi looked at me with surprise.

The yogurt guy looked at me with surprise.

Gigi didn't really blink an eye at my save.

She moved her yogurt to the scale, grabbed a spoon, then skipped to the neon green couch to sit with her yogurt to watch the mesmerizing show with the pointy headed kids who own the green platypus in the hat.

The yogurt guy was still looking at the whole situation with his mouth gaping open and large dilated pupils.

Monday, May 9, 2016

I learned about the frog in the foot, growing a good pasture, and wood chewing.

Before we got goats, I borrowed books from the library to tell me everything from how to trim their hooves to what diseases they could get.

Chickens are coming?

I bought books telling me how to tell what color eggs my chickens would lay and how they would roost when dusk came.

So, when we decided to get some ducks I did my research once again.

Why would we get ducks, you may be asking?

Why in the hell not, I'll respond.

I think getting farm animals is kind of like having children.

Once you have a few, what's a few more!

You're already used to the smell and the shoveling involved.

Kids and farm animals are similar like that.

Adding to the menagerie has been fun.

So, we ordered some ducks from the feed store and decided that we would get Indian Runner Ducks.

Runners are supposed to be good insect eaters.

I like that.

Runner ducks are ducks that stand upright when they walk.

They are sometimes called penguin ducks or wine bottle ducks.

I just call them cute.

And soon, I would be calling them dumb.

We brought them home from the feed store and, as we did with the chickens when they were newly born, put them in the kitchen in a plastic tub with a heat lamp and food and water.

These things seemed to grow 3 inches a night!

We had to put a dab of nail polish on their heads to tell them apart.

Charlie had blue.

Monty had orange.

Mandy was pink and Daffy didn't get any polish because she was shorter than the others.

They quickly outgrew the plastic tub and since they didn't yet have feathers, we couldn't put them in the cold barn yet.

So, we moved them to our bathtub.

Our ONLY bathtub.

Where they continued to grow 3 inches a night.

And shit enormous amounts of duck poo.

In the tub.

On the dining room floor.

On each other.

In their water bowl.

Chad was in the process of making them a duck house.

A wooden duck house would be placed in the barn right next to the chicken coop.

With a flip top lid and a window and cute door that looks like it came from a castle.

And he was instructed to "GET THAT HOUSE DONE STAT!"

I was about to go bonky with the poo everywhere.

And the bathtub needed to be returned to the people.

He got it done in lickety-split time and we moved the crazy quacking foursome out to the barn.

With their heat lamp and mess moved to the building behind the house, I felt my sanity returning.

But then the runner ducks, who have lived with us since they were two days old, began to run from us as if we were duck killers.

We would go out to the barn to feed them and they would run, in a straight line and as a group, away from us.

Falling over each other.

Running into fences and doors to get away from us.

As if we were Jason from the Friday the 13th movies.

Had they seen that movie?

How could they have seen that movie?!

If we took a step to the left, they would run in fear to the right.

If we stepped to the right, fear running to the left.

Our feelings were hurt.

And then I remembered from my duck books that runner ducks are an excitable breed.

Is this fear running what the text was referring to as easily excitable?

I guess so.

Duck killer running mode = normal Indian runner duck mentality.

Good grief.

What had we gotten ourselves into?

I tried reassuring the husband that instead of being annoyed with the ducks and their fear running, that we should instead look at them in a comical manner. They are a unit of four and will follow one another off of a cliff.

Let's keep them away from cliffs.

A few weeks ago we were at the farm store picking up some vegetable and herb plants for the garden.

Of course we had to venture to the rear of the store where the chicks and ducklings are kept during the spring buying season.

The girls and I found the sale bin.

And everyone knows I'm a sucker for a sale.

I said "oh look, the ducklings in this big tub are only $2 each."

Which was a deal to me, as I had paid a whole $5 each for those dumbo runner ducks.

"Step away from the tub!" my husband declared.

So we did.

Until we had gotten to the lawn seed that was six aisles over.

And he saw me stopping my cart.

And he knew I didn't want any lawn seed.

"No, no, no" he sputtered.

But the kids and I were peering back into the duck sale bin before he had expelled his third no.

"But they're on sale!"

I had the girls pick out two Khaki Campbell ducklings.

They are brown birds with a blueish bill.

And not as excitable as runner ducks.

My husband had conceded his fight against more ducklings the minute he saw the girls picking their choices from the bin.

But I've dug my way out and "Hey look! Alice Hoffman novels! They are really good!"

It started with this novel.

I saw it at the library in their new fiction section.

I'm drawn to covers.

And there was something about the woman on the cover that drew me towards her.

When I read the synopsis on the inside cover I was hooked when I read "island life, Paris, painters, love"

I'm a HUGE fan of historical fiction.

I've read all of Philippa Gregory's historical fiction novels about the Tudors.

Historical fiction takes a moment out of real history (as in Gregory's books about British royalty from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries) and fictionalizes conversations between these real historical figures.

In The Marriage of Opposites, Alice Hoffman focuses her story on the parents of the Danish-French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro in the 1800s.

That's the history part.

They all live on the island of St Thomas and you follow his parents love story and their interactions with others on this hot, fragrant, colorful, and tantalizing isle.

The story eventually turns to Paris, France and it's just as tantalizing and colorful in Paris as it was back on St Thomas.

It was a great read.

So, I went to the library and found another Alice Hoffman novel.

This peeked my interest.

Again, it was the cover.

And the synopsis told me I would be reading about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in NYC in 1911, Coney Island freak shows, photography, and love.

History and fiction melded together quite well in this book.

I was as hooked while reading this story as I was in The Marriage of Opposites.

So, I went to the library again and found my way to the HOF adult fiction section and perused the Alice Hoffman section once more.

I saw Practical Magic.

Was this made into a movie?

I couldn't quite remember, but the story sounded interesting to me.

Two sisters, witches, love.

Hmmm, no historical fiction.

But, I gave it a go.

I didn't care for it as much as the others.

It seemed too fluffy to me.

I missed the historical aspect of the other novels.

This book focused on instant sexual attraction, the need to have a man more than needing yourself, and like I said...fluff.

I did finish it and took it back to the library yesterday.

I saw this on the shelf of books that needed to be reshelved (have you found that shelf at your library yet?!)

Judy Blume, the author who wrote all of those teen novels that were so taboo when they were written in the 1970s because she spoken about *gasp* sex.

I've seen Judy Blume talking about this newest novel on TV recently and it's about history so I snatched it up.

Three airplanes fell from the sky in New Jersey in the early 1950s.

This is Judy Blume's historical aspect of her new novel.

She lived in New Jersey when these planes fell from the sky, so she's also fictionalizing her own history a bit.

About Me

We inherited a farm that has been in my family since the early 1900's. Our farm houses a barn with a pony and two goats as residents, a silo, and a few acres of land. Our previous address had been in Chicago, where the only horses we saw were the ones that pulled people in carriages downtown. We are learning to thrive in the country while keeping the city in our hearts. Then everything changed when childhood leukemia came knocking on our door...